Paper 280_elpub2008:An overview of the development of open access journals and repositories in Mexico

id

280_elpub2008

authors

Galina, Isabel; Giménez, Joaquín

year

2008

title

An overview of the development of open access journals and repositories in Mexico

source

ELPUB2008. Open Scholarship: Authority, Community, and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing held in Toronto, Canada 25-27 June 2008 / Edited by: Leslie Chan and Susanna Mornati. ISBN 978-0-7727-6315-0, 2008, pp. 280-287

summary

It has been noted that one of the potential benefits of Open Access is the increase in visibility for research output from less developed countries. However little is known about the development of OA journals and repositories in these regions. This paper presents an exploratory overview of the situation in Mexico, one of the leading countries in terms of scientific output in Latin America. To conduct the overview we focused on OA journals and repositories already in place and in development. It was particularly hard to locate information and our results do not intend to be exhaustive. We identified 72 Mexican OA journals using DOAJ. Of these journals 45 are from REDALyC which we identified as a key project in OA journal development in Mexico. Using OpenDOAR and ROAR, ten Mexican repositories were identified. These were reviewed and classified. We found a large variation between repositories in terms of size, degree of development and type. The more advanced repositories were well developed in terms of content and developing added on services. We also found inter-institutional groups working on advanced OAI tools. We also did a case study of 3R, a repository development project at one of the countries leading universities. This included interviews with two repository managers. The main challenges we found were lack of institutional buy in, staffing and policy development. The OA movement has not yet permeated the academic research environment. However, there are important working groups and projects that could collaborate and coordinate in order to lobby university authorities, national bodies and funders.